A paving crew works in the Ashby area of Sydney on Wednesday. (STEVE WADDEN)

SYDNEY — There’s a lot of finger pointing — but not a lot of roadwork — going on in Cape Breton Regional Municipality.

Mark Eyking, the Liberal MP for Sydney-Victoria, said Wednesday that municipalities across the country are facing the same problem as money from the federal New Building Canada Fund is not flowing quickly enough to take advantage of the construction season.

He said he believes Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Conservative government are intentionally holding up cost-shared infrastructure projects this year for partisan purposes, with a federal election likely on the horizon in 2015.

“If they really wanted this stuff to roll out this summer, they would have made it happen, because they already announced last fall that they were going to do it,” Eyking said.

“But I think they’re just pushing it ahead to balance the books and make themselves look good for next year.

“I blame it on Harper and the Harper government for why it’s rolled out so slow.”

The Conservatives announced the New Building Canada Fund last year to cost-share $14 billion in infrastructure work over 10 years with the provinces and municipalities.

However, the program criteria weren’t finalized until the end of March, after the Federation of Canadian Municipalities expressed concerns about the design of the program. Municipalities have been scrambling to get their projects approved since then.

Eyking said projects have been held up across the country, although a couple of large projects that have been approved in New Brunswick and Quebec appear to have been “cherry-picked” by the Conservatives.

Jen Powroz, an Infrastructure Canada spokeswoman, said in an email Wednesday that Central Nova MP and Justice Minister Peter MacKay announced improvements to Highway 103 on July 4, which was the first eligible project in Nova Scotia under the New Building Canada Fund.

“Projects must be prioritized by the Province of Nova Scotia before receiving federal funding,” she said. “So far, the province has not prioritized projects from the Cape Breton Regional Municipality.”

On Monday, Cape Breton Mayor Cecil Clarke said in a news release that $27 million in roadwork was ready to go under a cost-sharing formula that would see the provincial and federal governments kick in $18 million of the total.

He said the work on collector and arterial streets was being held up at the provincial level, where the three-way funding is administered.

The municipality is now spending $3.2 million in work on small, local roads that are cost-shared equally with Ottawa under its gas tax rebate program, bringing the total of local roadwork to $6.4 million.

It’s the heavy-traffic roads that aren’t being done yet, and Clarke said the summer work season is slipping away, threatening local construction jobs and putting the projects at risk for this year.

“We were the first municipality to provide our list of priorities to the province,” he said. “Unless we get approval immediately, projects will run out of time.”

The municipality borrowed $12 million this year to help fund $36 million in cost-shared projects, including $9 million for heavy-traffic roads and the $3.2 million for local roads.

On Monday, Municipal Affairs Minister Mark Furey told The Chronicle Herald that all Nova Scotia municipalities are in the same boat and provincial officials were working diligently to get applications completed accurately to avoid having the federal government send them back.

In the case of Cape Breton Regional Municipality, he said, provincial and municipal staff were regularly in contact to get the numbers right.

“What we’re trying to do is to confirm numbers based on the criteria that the programs require,” Furey said, “and in these circumstances there were concerns with numbers that were submitted by CBRM and we’re trying to resolve that and bring an application that’s accurate and reflects the information that the application requires.”

Eyking said the federal government designed the program and the criteria and that’s where the bottleneck lies.

“The province is really stuck in the middle,” he said. “They get the applications from the municipalities, but they have to vet them so they clear the hurdle for the feds, or the feds are just going to bounce it back.”

Eddie Orrell, Conservative MLA for Northside-Westmount, said in a news release Wednesday that Eyking should stop playing “the blame game” and get the provincial Liberals to move faster. Eyking’s wife, Pam, is the Liberal MLA for Victoria-The Lakes.